Bears on Chairs by Shirley Parenteau. Illustrated by David Walker (2009)  

          Bears on Chairs is a small drama about creative, peaceful problem-solving, just the kind of cooperation every preschool classroom needs. Recommend this to preschool teachers for classroom sharing.  It’s told in rhyme and is reminiscent of Ruth Krauss’ Bears, which recently was re-illustrated by Sendak for a new edition. That book pairs well with this, but I most often use the Krauss as a straight action rhyme (i.e., without the book). The bears in both of these sit in chairs, and they give stares---- so there’s a fun opportunity to mention to parents how important it is to talk about new words (vocabulary), how children need to hear new words repeated many times before they can claim them as their own, and—if you use the action rhyme---how kids learn words best in context, and how simple creative dramatics can encourage this.  Actually, the whole book could be acted out easily by preschoolers (although I haven’t tried this). So let’s add narrative skills to the mix. (“Parents, acting out simple stories helps your child learn how stories work, how they have a beginning, middle and end, and how one thing follows another in sequence.”)  I haven’t mentioned  the opportunities this provides for talking about phonological awareness and how rhyming leads to reading….but you get the picture, I’m sure!

- Nell Colburn